Deathlife: Hip Hop and Thanatological Narrations of Blackness [Paperback]

InDeathlife, Anthony B. Pinn analyzes hip hop to explore how Blackness serves as a framework for defining and guiding the relationship between life and death in the United States. Pinn argues that white supremacy and white privilege operate based on the right to distinguish death from life. This distinction is produced and maintained through the construction of Blackness asdeathlife. Drawing on Afropessimism and Black moralism, Pinn theorizesdeathlifeas a technology of whiteness that projects whites’ anxieties about the end of their lives onto the Black other. Examining the music of Jay-Z; Kendrick Lamar; Tyler, the Creator; and others, Pinn shows how hip hop configures the interconnection and dependence between death and life in such a way that death and life become indistinguishable. In so doing, Pinn demonstrates that hip hop presents an alternative todeathlifethat challenges the white supremacist definitions of Blackness and anti-Blackness more generally.USAnthony Pinn examines how hip hop artists challenge white supremacist definitions of Blackness by challenging white distinctions between life and death.Anthony B. Pinn is Agnes Cullen Arnold Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Professor of Religion at Rice University. He is the author of numerous books, most recently,Interplay of Things: Religion, Art, and Presence Together, also published by Duke University Press.“Not since Orlando Patterson’s magisterial exploration of social death have we had as monumental an engagement with the ideas of life, death, and Blackness as Anthony Pinn delivers in his groundbreaking bookDeathlife. Pinn uses hip hop’s struggles between life and death, and with life as death, to illumine both the white quest for immortality through slaying Blackness, and the Black hunger for meaning by staring nothingness in the eye.Deathlifecaptures the way that Blackness and being, and Blackness and nonbeing, have had lS